Late Library Books Can Take Toll on Credit Scores

Librarians in Queens do not like to talk about the scofflaws who rack up fines for late books. They prefer to call them “clients” or “patrons” who owe “extended-use fees.” Competing against a tide of video games and cable shows, they are loath to scare away anyone who wants to read.

But their patience has limits. When provoked, they play hardball.

Eleven years ago, the Queens Library system, the largest in the nation by circulation, hired a professional enforcer to collect the 25-cents-a-day late fines as well as missing library materials from books to DVDs to rare musical scores.

The gambit has paid off handsomely. The haul so far: $11.4 million, about half of that in fines. That’s a lot of quarters.

Borrowers who fail to return Queens Library books can be reported to a collection agency and to a credit bureau, with a damaged credit rating as a result — a tactic that so shocked one Far Rockaway rabbi that he filed a lawsuit. The collection policy also has pulled libraries — places where generations of children have learned moral lessons about returning what they borrow — into the debate on just how much punishment is appropriate for failing to return a library book.

The borough library system signed on in 1996 as the largest client of Unique Management Services, a collection agency that had reorganized itself three years earlier to specialize in recovering library books and late fees. The company, based in Jeffersonville, Ind., now chases down late accounts for more than 900 library systems, including the New York Public Library, several in Canada and two in England.

The company’s muscle comes from its ability to report some library users to credit bureaus. Unique Management contacts library patrons by letter and phone with an encouraging yet ultimately threatening message: Your library wants to keep you as a patron in good standing. Contact them to return your books and settle your fees. Or we will report you.

The quest to recover lost books has left some librarians ambivalent about the tactic.

Jane Montalto, who oversees the Queens Library’s collection of 22,000 musical scores, said the library should not be associated with punishment. “It’s supposed to be a place of pleasure and learning,” she said.

On the other hand, when people flout library rules, the innocent may suffer. Ms. Montalto recalled the panic that one patron went through when he needed a Bellini score to study for an opera audition. The library owns five copies, but none of them could be found. She wonders: How many chances should you get if you say you have returned a book or a DVD that is not on the shelf?

“Are you honest? Are you responsible?” she said. “Or are you just one of those customers who uses us — who has their own collection out there?”

One problem, said Sharon Kugler, a research librarian at the Queens Central Library on Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica, is that people no longer consider a late library book to be an ethical lapse. “They consider it a quarter-a-day rental,” she said.

Unique’s aim, said Kenes Bowling, the company’s manager for customer development, is to shock such people — most of whom, he said, are “folks like you and me” and do not mean any harm — into action.

It works. About 70 percent of the people contacted by the company (who, in Queens, have ignored or missed four notices from the library) return some of their overdue materials or pay part of their fines.

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Patrons at the Flushing branch; the Queens Library system is the nations largest by circulation.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

“Once reported, this adverse information can stay on your record for seven years!” declares one of the company’s standard letters, which goes on to warn that car dealers, department stores and banks may learn of the library users’ misdeeds. “Why allow this to happen?”

Rabbi Avrohom Sebrow of Far Rockaway said he was flabbergasted when it happened to him.

As a child in Forest Hills, Rabbi Sebrow said, he loved to visit his local branch, and he grew up to be an enthusiastic library patron. He is a teacher at a yeshiva, where instilling reverence for texts and scholarship is central to his calling. Sometimes, like many library patrons, he is late in returning a book, he admitted in a recent interview, but he said he always paid his fines.

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In 2005, Rabbi Sebrow said, he was overwhelmed after the birth of twin daughters and found himself six months overdue on materials he had checked out from the North Forest Park branch in Forest Hills. He cannot remember exactly what was late, but he thinks that several CDs were involved. He received a letter from Unique Management, which also uses the name Unique National Collections, demanding $295.40 — the cost of replacing the materials, plus $66 in late fees.

“I figured, ‘I’ll take care of it eventually,’” Rabbi Sebrow said. He did not believe the section of the letter that threatened to report him to credit agencies. “I thought it was a complete empty threat,” he said.

But when he applied for a mortgage and a credit card, he discovered that the oversight had blemished his credit record.

Rabbi Sebrow eventually succeeded in clearing his credit record. He mailed the overdue materials back to the library and sued Unique on the grounds that the company’s license to act as a debt collector in New York City had lapsed. He won a $1,000 out-of-court settlement. (The company has corrected the lapse, which was accidental, Mr. Bowling said.)

Rabbi Sebrow remains sympathetic to the library — and deeply embarrassed that his students would find out about his slip. (They might, he worries, take a more cavalier attitude toward the school library.)

“I really think that the library is within their rights to do what they did,” he said.

Joanne King, the spokeswoman for the Queens Library, said, “We really work hard on that guilt.”

The Brooklyn Public Library hired Unique in 1998 but stopped using the company in 2003 because it was not receiving the $1.5 million in annual returns that it had hoped for, a library spokesman said. But the New York Public Library, which runs branches in Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx, has been a satisfied client since 1995, library officials said. Unique has retrieved $5.8 million for the system, including, in the fiscal year that ended in June, $415,695 worth of materials and $335,062 in cash, money that the library spends on new materials.

Still, lawyers and credit bureaus disagreed about whether information from library records should be used to determine who is creditworthy. Unique does not report children to the credit bureau, or parents whose children have taken out late books, or people who owe less than $25, Mr. Bowling said. Patrons who settle up also are not reported.

The average account reported to Unique owes about $80, Mr. Bowling said. Rarely does an overdue account exceed $1,000, he said, and those that do belong to people who are stealing and selling library materials, often videos and DVDs. The largest overdue accounts he can recall have reached $10,000.

The Queens Library has also developed friendlier collection methods. One program, “Read Down Your Fees,” allows children under 17 to earn $1 per hour against their fines by reading in the library as a librarian keeps watch. During the last fiscal year, 16,612 children were forgiven $24,734 in fines through the program.

Ms. King said the library’s goal was not to ruin people’s credit or collect fines, but to get back missing books. And she had little sympathy for people who ignored so many notices that they were reported to the credit bureaus.

“We’re stewards of the material for the people of Queens,” she said. “It’s not ours to give away.”